Medardo Fraile - Things Look Different in the Light & Other Stories

At nine o’clock, he went up the stairs to take his class, sometimes teaching one year, sometimes another. At ten o’clock he came down. He could be seen smoking a cigarette and pacing about in the entrance hall, and when there was a school meeting, he would punctually take his place, silent, but never hermetically so. He would greet the mothers of the children, the female teachers and the cleaners with a gesture that was parsimonious, yet gentlemanly and fulsome. In his classes all was peace and respect, the respect imposed by his measured words, his affable remoteness, his tone of voice, his conscientiousness, the exemplary irrevocability of everything he did in the classroom. Señor Otaola’s classes, his every step, were as they were, and nothing could change them. Knowing him, one could understand why the heavenly spheres do not bump into each other, why Nature always arrives promptly each spring, bearing flowers, why it never forgets the formula for making clouds, why life and death reach into so many corners in wise, miraculous silence. Glaciers in spring, blossoms in winter. And his slow hands moving in the air, dissecting imagined hexapods, ruthlessly stripping the petals from the sterile daisy of science. Did anyone have anything more to add about Señor Otaola?

Only Gil Fajardo in 2C — and it was surely a lie. He said that, over a period of two or three days, right in the middle of a lesson, he had heard the metallic rattle of a cricket. It wasn’t the complete sound, he said, more like a gentle strumming, as if the cricket were timidly tuning up its elytra. As if it were agreeing, from its position of animal inferiority, with something Señor Otaola had said about orthoptera or possibly about some other subject, he couldn’t quite remember: cryptogams, phanerogams, dunes, the courses of rivers, estuaries, meanders, sandbanks, volcanoes or hydrostatic levels… And, of course, he didn’t know whether the sound of the cricket was pretend or real, although it seemed to come from near where Señor Otaola was standing. But that is what Gil Fajardo said later. Before — if it’s true what he said — he had kept quiet about it or not believed it. Because he said this after the accident, which was really something rather more than what we would normally describe as an accident.

Señor Otaola had finished his lesson with the third years with his accustomed air of normality. The bell rang to announce the hour. It was ten o’clock. He went down the stairs as usual. And when he had gone down the first flight and was standing on the second landing, he stood looking at the steps before him, twelve of them, and suddenly took a leap, a leap intended to carry him from one landing to the next. Señor Otaola performed this leap with unwonted, childlike glee, although one could also say that he did not entirely lose his air of seriousness. He fell on the seventh stair and rolled down the last five. Señor Otaola broke a leg and sustained injuries to his head and one arm.

The leap was witnessed by Señor Rodríguez, the maths teacher, who was also going down the stairs at that moment, by Señorita Eulalia, the art teacher, who was coming up, and by several pupils from various years, who were racing down the stairs to answer a call of nature.

WE ENDED UP renting an apartment on the Costa Templada, near Almuñécar, one of the areas being promoted by the tourist board at the time.

She was happy. And I wasn’t in a bad mood exactly, just a little grumpy.

It turned out that the apartment was new, and there were still spots of paint on the door handles and on the skirting board. The first thing we did was to go into the village and buy cloths, scrubbing brushes, detergent and a litre of turps.

There was nowhere to hang our clothes and, instead of telling the concierge or writing a letter to the owner, I bought some metal hooks and screwed them into the back of the doors in the bedroom and bathroom.

Seeing my wife labouring away removing paint stains, I decided to give her a hand, and for three or four days — of the fifteen days we were going to spend there — I didn’t even have time to pick up a book or a pen. When we arrived, I was reading Charles Bally and all that fascinating stuff about the substantivation of the adjective.

I found the turps such a miraculous substance that I opened my suitcase and looked the word up in the dictionary. It turned out to be essence of turpentine, a semi-fluid resin exuded by pines, firs, larches and terebinths. I associated the last with healthy, summer things, which pleased me.

Almost every day we found something else wrong; the bedside table and the chairs were as wobbly as if they had a leg missing, but the sea was so close — we could see it from our balcony — and we went to the sea from day two on.

To get to the sea we had to pass a supermarket and a campsite run by a Belgian. Then we just had to go up a dusty hill, down another one and there we were — at about a quarter past one — at the beach, where one could immediately make out three distinct lines: the shifting line of the water, the dark line of wet sand, and the line formed by the sunshades and awnings with people underneath and around them, and, whether sitting or lying down, all were looking at the sea.

The sun appeared to cause smoke to rise from every surface, and, when I took off my sandals, I had to scamper onto a patch of sand in the shade so as not to burn my feet. My wife, being less sensitive, tougher or more indifferent, followed me.

From her bag she produced a large tube of Nivea — a yellowish cream, especially made to protect you from sunburn — and began rubbing it on my back. The touch of her fingers made me feel numb and tired; I yawned and began to grow bored.

Then she said:

“Would you mind putting some Nivea on my back too?”

I did so, yawning.

There were two classes of humanity on the beach: the bronzed, oily, sweaty variety, and the more refined, reserved sort, who sat in the bluish shade and seemed, oddly, to rule over everyone else.

The sea did not so much murmur as boom, drowning out human voices.

While I was applying Nivea to Merche’s back, a fierce, blueblack horsefly appeared, with all guns blazing, determined to bite me. I had the devil’s own job shooing it off, because it was as fast and incisive as a cutting remark.

Some yards away a small, fit-looking man was speaking French to two young women lying on the sand; every now and then, he would whistle ‘Strangers in the Night’ or sing it in English.

The night, of course, any night, bore no resemblance to that overwhelming midday heat that weighed on the shoulders and seemed to rise, burning, from your feet up. Or perhaps it did, perhaps the sun was also a kind of night, which enervated and blinded us, and made us all into strangers “exchanging glances” and “wandering in the night”, as the Frenchman kept insisting.

I raised my arms and felt as if I were deflating with weariness.

I went for a short run, and the pebbles cut into my feet. And then, as I walked back, I felt an unpleasant tension in my groin.

Then we went for a swim. Merche plunged straight in, while I thought about it for a while. The water struck cold at first, and once you were in, it never became what you might call warm, as the name Costa Templada suggested it would. We swam for a while; we smiled at each other. We looked and were looked at, blatantly and with impunity, by other heads bobbing about in the water.

Merche said:

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer.

I came out of the water before she did and went for another run, less painful this time, along the wet sand.

Merche stayed in the water as if she had no intention of ever coming out, and I sat down in line with the other humans looking at the sea.